Did You Miss The Celebration? | Dr. Edward F. Berger

In the primary elections, big money from outside – called Dark Money – succeeded in blocking community interests. Take the future of our public schools for example. By positioning themselves for a win in the general election, they can put in place a plan to destroy our community schools, elected school boards, and the preservation of our highly successful education programs. Why would they do this? The main reason is access to the tax dollars we pay. They are working on many fronts to privatize public services like schools and prisons. They want a big chunk of our tax dollars for personal profit.

A second objective is ideological. A powerful but extreme minority believe that parents can create educational opportunities that better fit their children. These opportunities range from no schooling, to homeschooling, religious schooling, or private schools run for profit. These will be paid for with our tax dollars through schemes like ATM accounts where every kid (family) has access to say, $8,000 per child to spend anywhere in the free market. However, none will be accountable to any democratically elected representatives, standards, or course of study. The plan many in the legislature have in mind is to destroy existing, proven and effective public schools, and let the resulting chaos determine the future of our state and our nation. Their language is full of words like vouchers, scholarships, the marketplace, school choice, and conservative.

Is there any example of programs like these that have worked for children and America? None. Everywhere voucher programs have been tried they have failed. Failure of an ideological experiment may seem like the cost of trying something new, that is until you track the children and families disrupted and severely set back by obvious wrong thinking.